Walk around Reno and you can feel a charge in the air. The energy is palpable. Whether strolling by the funky boutiques of midtown or taking in a quick pint in the brewery district, you can’t help but see that buildings are rising from the ground all around the region.

Does Reno hold the biggest little blueprint for emerging technology hubs? That’s the question that more than 200 tech sector CEOs, executives and government leaders will tackle as they flock to the Biggest Little City for the inaugural VentureBeat Blueprint event from March 5 to 7.

David Audretsch, one of the most well-known entrepreneurship researchers in the world, will be giving a talk that is intended for students, entrepreneurs, and the general public on November 30, 2017 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. The title of Audretsch’s talk is, “Have We Oversold the Silicon Valley Model of Entrepreneurship?”

Three Reno, Nevada-based startups talked about these themes during a panel discussion at a VentureBeat event to launch our Heartland Tech channel ahead of the 2017 Blueprint conference. At the gathering, founders of the companies told their stories of growth outside the tech metropolis.

The Reno Startup Deck is a deck of playing cards, created by EDAWN, featuring 52 key northern Nevada entrepreneurial people, programs and events. Here are the rules from the very first card of the deck.

When David Knight founded the data-trading platform Terbine last year in the Bay Area, he immediately recognized the saturation of startups in the Silicon Valley and the high cost of doing business there, and he set out to relocate. The serial entrepreneur narrowed his search to two possibilities: Austin, Texas, and Las Vegas, with Southern Nevada emerging as the front-runner.

The allure of Reno is its promise and potential to become a vibrant technology city without all of the downsides of a tech capital like Silicon Valley. If we can attract Tesla, Switch, Microsoft and Apple, but keep at bay the sky-high commercial real estate prices, snarled traffic and exorbitant housing prices, Reno will remain a magnet to maturing technology and logistics companies.